Return to Sender
by MD Owen
Summary: Left alone, that's all Carol wants, but someone alerts her about the devastating attack on Alexandria and members of her family.


_SPOILER WARNING: If you are not current up to season 7._

 _This was a friend's birthday gift; she requested a story of Carol finding out about Daryl's kidnapping._

Even with a world crawling of terror and decay, the sun rose every morning, through paper thin clouds and amber leaves swept over trees as autumn whispered its return. Dewdrops accompanied insects fretting about the land, weary of mangled human body parts in the way of their precious food source. As the sun washed over Carol's home, the surrounding area was remarkably clear of most walkers' corpses and resembled a time capsule of a house and yard before the Event.

The back of the house opened softly through gentle morning rays, giving Carol a short burst of fresh air on her way to the garden. Her usual wake-up time was compromised by a peculiar, unsettling vision moments prior to the moon disappearing from the skies. The vision, foggy at best, churned a sickening feeling in her stomach, and she was relieved to not remember the finer details of the vision. The presence of it alone threw off a good portion of her morning chores.

Walkers became fewer and far between. She cut them off at the pass weeks earlier and set up traps and makeshift alarms towards the west. When they shuffled from the other directions, she staked out all day and annihilated the threat before it reached her feet, shoving a knife in their cerebrums and disposing the remains in a deep ravine to the north.

The winters in Virginia would slow down the herds, freezing them in tombs of ice much easier than the winters in Georgia. She hoped the miserable summer that just passed meant a cruel winter.

Someday the herds and stranglers would disappear and no more hell roamed the earth.

During her mid morning jog back to the house, Carol noticed her mailbox lid ajar. Through her elevated breathing, she opened the creaky box, curious what was placed in it, for old times sake.

There was a note, several pages thick with cursive words in black ink and each word carefully chosen and written to her: "Dear Carol Peletier.."

Only three people knew of her current whereabouts..

She read on, and stopped breathing after the first sentence: "...You need to know what happened to members of your family." Her lungs forced her to function again. "Glenn, Abraham, and Daryl."

Daryl...

The cursive handwriting blurred through her vision and trembling hands.

They were safe, right? They were tougher than she was. They didn't need her to survive.

Behind her came a familiar snarl in the distance. She ignored it and continued reading.

"The rebel group known as the Saviors came looking for them. Members of your family did not survive this encounter."

The snarl from the walker drew closer, but it was drowned by the blood thundering in her ears.

"Negan, their leader, made an example of his authority by viciously killing Abraham, and then Glenn, with his weapon: a barbed wire bat affectionately called Lucille."

The images of her family members crowded her mind, thinning the heart beat in her head. She knew one would use a baseball bat to bash something. Bash something like a... vulnerable human skull.

Glenn and Abe's heads, full of memories and courage and strength, were snuffed out by this Negan monster's play toy.

She gasped reading the next sentence: "Daryl was taken hostage."

The mailbox lid hung open, scraping a ball of flesh from the short walker's contorted arm as it scrambled after Carol, who ignored it and headed into her home. She closed the blinds and dimmed the lanterns, taking safety on the edge of the bed. The walker's growls outside blended with the deep sobs slowly climbing from her chest until they were wails in the palms of her hands.

Mid afternoon arrived, normally reminding her to eat, but unlike the walker outside her walls whose hunger never ceased, she chose another way to channel her emotions. At first, she was tempted to blow a hole through her living room window and destroy the damn walker to pieces, getting the hoe from the garden, chopping it into pellets, dosing it with gasoline, and watching it burn down to nothing.

Or even gathering up multiple walkers, setting them all ablaze, and fire bomb the hell out of Negan and the Saviors.

...all after rescuing Pookie of course. She felt the warm tears again. He hated that name, making her smile a little here in the present time.

But while the thoughts were heroic and possible, she couldn't do it alone. Infiltrating Terminus was a stroke of pure luck for her, and the Saviors were familiar with outside threat lurking at any time. It would fail; she would get everyone killed and live forever with the guilt, like a cockroach in a frozen hour glass.

Carol twirled an unlit cigarette in her hands, dropping it twice in the fresh dirt her boots made through the house. Two weeks sober from the nicotine, the stress reeled in Carol's lack of willpower at a vulnerable, pivotal moment. It was only temporary relief from a permanent dilemma, and the tobacco had been making her a little sick, or maybe it was the change of season. She didn't feel like smoking anymore and dropped it a third time on the floor, squishing it under her boot.

Now the walker was outside her bedroom window, still disturbing her peace with its clawing and scraping on the pane, its unnatural silhouette wavering behind the silky curtain. Carol was gambling with the time by ignoring the walker and picking up a chewed blue ink pen on the bedside table. There was an old printed advertisement for the local Hometown Grocery stuffed in the drawer, its backside blank and perfect for what she needed to do. She ignored the two year old ad promising it had the " _best prices in town, sale ends Wednesday!"_ and carefully determined the right words to use for her reply to the mysterious mail man.

"What can I do for them anymore?"

Carol wrote that question, signing off her letter to Fate. It was the first thought she had when the the next morning streamed through her kitchen window, her back to the sun and the occasional crooked shadow of the hissing walker milling around the house, still trying to find her. She didn't eat at all yesterday, her stomach promptly reminded her. She swallowed deep and slow, tensing her lips and stretching the muscles in her arms until she lifted from her seat, and then back down into it, releasing the enormous stress throughout her body. Carol faced creatures of the dead and fear everyday, but she was scared to death of a reply from a living person.

Her letter had been placed in the mailbox, flag up, at 5am. The walker stayed by her bedroom window for most of the night but shuffled behind the house, near the backdoor before sunrise, like it somehow knew her routine. She had sneaked out the front door quickly, and because the front gate was left opened the day before, it made her task of inserting the letter into the box easier. Her hands felt clammy against the metal, and she returned to the house without alerting the walker. There was a small growl from it once the front door closed.

As the day rolled on with peaks of sunshine through stormy clouds and pockets of rain, Carol stayed inside the house, sharpening her weapons, reviewing maps of the surrounding area, and storing the vegetables in the extra bedroom, her makeshift root cellar. She needed to stay busy to flush her mind of the terrible attacks on her family and of her own guilt clawing at the soul. It was impossible to cry now, as the feel of tears on her cold skin alienated her spirit and curled her stomach into knots of biliousness.

The afternoon rain pounded on the roof, dulling the sound of the walker now outside of her livingroom window. She used the opportunity to crack open the kitchen window, catching the showers in jagged bottle containers. It was a bad call on her part to let the walker roam free instead of killing it yesterday, but the rain would ease off soon and she could strike it down then. It might be a good idea so the mystery mail man could deliver the letter without a walker acting like a rabid dog and chasing the person off the property. She almost chuckled at the thought.

A quarter to 6pm, the storms ceased, giving birds a chance to twitter again and pushing vague rays of sunshine through the sodden trees. When it was time for her salad dinner, something disturbed the walker from its boredom, its snarls lit and broken limbs lumbering away from the house. She stopped her fork of lettuce and tomato inches from her mouth and listened closely to the events outside the door. The walker was fighting something, or someone, cutting the air with its angry yelps and banging against the gate, trying to break through it to get to its victim.

As the fork dropped in her bowl, there was a loud whack, a mushy thud, and no more snarls or growls in the air. A tiny squeak and a gentle tap of the flag on the mailbox perked her ears.

The mail man had picked up the day's letter. She finished her dinner and strolled to the gate.

After discarding the walker in the ravine the next day, Carol foraged through the woods for lingering berries, any dry sticks, and scavenged the area for rogue walkers. The weather provided surprised humidity through her morning and afternoon hike, and when the cooler evening tickled the warm sweat down her neck, she encountered several walkers during the return home, eliminating them with the swiftness in her knife and wrists, leaving the trail of meat and bones behind her. She would let the animals pick off their bones and discard the rest tomorrow.

The mud squished under her boots the closer she approached her residence, and her left foot splashed in a hole of water when she peered at the mailbox, noticing the flag was lifted up again. The sunset beamed over the box, like a sign she didn't need to ignore because as she found out after dropping the lid, another letter had been delivered.

Night followed after she left her dirty boots on the front porch and lit the lantern at the kitchen table. Her hands shook while opening the blank envelope. It wasn't a thick letter this time; in fact it was one page and read:

"You've answered your own question, but if you need confirmation, dear Carol..."

The lump returned to her throat.

"...then go to them."

She crumbled the letter, tossing it across the room and switched off the lantern. Burying her face into the arm of the flower patterned couch where she pounded her head against it and exhausted from the day's work guided her to an anxious slumber until late morning. Over a quick breakfast, she decided not to write any more letters and continued her daily routine of tending the garden and jogging up the road. Carol's thoughts ran faster than her legs, and she confused sweat with tears fanning off her cheeks.

Upon her return to the house and a quiet cool down from the run, Carol found a sharpie and a piece of cardboard in her bedroom closet. A sense of dread and relief blended as she scribbled on the board, the sharpie dying on the final stroke. The house didn't require much cleaning other than the ball of paper that landed behind the end table and lamp next to the front door. It remained there through Carol's footsteps around the house; she pulled the old duffle bag out of the hallway closet and choked back tears as she packed clothes, food, bottled water, and an assortment of knives and a gun between the clothes. She agonized over leaving a peaceful haven, one that she made her own and delegated the rules and chores and kept trouble far from her.

But trouble always returned in this world. She couldn't keep running from it.

The front door closed for the last time behind Carol. She tied on her boots left on the porch overnight, knocking the dried dirt off them, and placed the cardboard sign on the door. She gave a long hard look at the porch, leaving behind the words on the sign: " _Vacancy. Take what you need"._ Passing through the gate, she raised the flag on the mailbox and kept her head low on the cold trail to Alexandria.


End file.
